Why do you go to the mountains?

[Starshadow]

For me, usually by the third day out in the woods/mountains, that sense of calm, an aligning with the surroundings is present. The world of schedules and time dissolves. It is why I return. I found the following and it says it so well. Nature isn`t distracted by my "position" or "opinion." It is there without thought or judgement.



Excerpted from: STILLNESS SPEAKS
By Eckhart Tolle

We depend on nature not only for our physical survival. We also need nature to show us the way home, the way out of the prison of our own minds. We got lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating - lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems.

We have forgotten what rocks, plants, and animals still know. We have forgotten how to be - to be still, to be ourselves, to be where life is: Here and Now.

Whenever you bring your attention to anything natural, anything that has come into existence without human intervention, you step out of the prison of conceptualized thinking and, to some extent, participate in the state of connectedness with Being in which everything natural still exists.

To bring your attention to a stone, a tree, or an animal does not mean to think about it, but simply to perceive it, to hold it in your awareness.

Something of its essence then transmits itself to you. You can sense how still it is, and in doing so the same stillness arises within you. You sense how deeply it rests in Being - completely at one with what it is and where it is. In realizing this, you too come to a place of rest deep within yourself.

When walking or resting in nature, honor that realm by being there fully. Be still. Look. Listen. See how every animal and every plant is completely itself. Unlike humans, they have not split themselves in two. They do not live through mental images of themselves, so they do not need to be concerned with trying to protect and enhance those images. The deer is itself. The daffodil is itself.

All things in nature are not only one with themselves but also one with the totality. They haven't removed themselves from the fabric of the whole by claiming a separate existence: "me" and the rest of the universe.

The contemplation of nature can free you of that "me," the great troublemaker.

Bring awareness to the many subtle sounds of nature - the rustling of leaves in the wind, raindrops falling, the humming of an insect, the first birdsong at dawn. Give yourself completely to the act of listening. Beyond the sounds there is something greater: a sacredness that cannot be understood through thought.

[Seeker]

i don't think i've ever put that much thought into it, but your quote sums it up pretty well... the connection with something greater than myself, the peace, the 'being what i was created to be' (ie, focus on just being, vs doing something).

my wife, on rare occassions, will go hiking with me. i like the 'merging with the scenary' thing that happens. she fights it. we've discussed it, and she likes being 'out in it', usually, if it's not cold and/or rainy, while i enjoy being 'part of it'. she observes the scenary. i like to become part of it, as if i were just another animal in the woods.

unfortunately, like you say, it takes about 3 days to happen, and a weekend is only 2 days long.

[redhawk]

Why?

To get away from people.

To get away from the hustle, bustle, the technology, the noise, the pollution (getting harder and harder to do that).

To be able to stop and smell the flowers, hear the rustle of the leaves in the wind, the rolling of the brook, birdsong.

But above all, to get out of myself and into the Creator, or rather let the Creator into me.

One of the great lines from Walden, i think in the chapter titles "Sounds". "I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans"

Hawk

[sky]

to just "exist".

[Bill I.]

unfortunately, like you say, it takes about 3 days to happen, and a weekend is only 2 days long.

One benefit of being unmarried and living just a stone's throw from the blue line is that I get to be in the woods pretty much on a weekly basis. This cuts the transition time down quite a bit.

Also, the amount of time it takes depends largely on the disparity between one's everyday life and their camp life. Someone who lives deep in a big city and only gets to the wilderness once in a while might take longer to adjust. And there is a group of hikers who bring their city lives--specifically, their schedules and agendas--with them into the woods and never make the adjustment, because they *seem* to be more preoccupied with accomplishing a certain goal within a certain amount of time. This group has a name, but I see no point in mentioning that name here. It would only offend some people.

Myself, I perceive myself as someone who is in my natural state for 2 days of the week, and a detached observer for the remaining 5 days. Being blissfully laid off for nearly four months--thank you, bank merger!--has blurred the distinction. I am now someone who prowls the woods on sunny days, and writes about them (spirit willing) on cloudy days.

I've tried to dance around the same general points quoted by Starshadow above in my own columns for the Utica newspaper over the last year. I was going to link to some of them here, but the older ones have been deleted from their website, apparently. The most recent ones have been edited to death to accommodate the reduced size of the weekly outdoor page. I won't link to those two columns, because I don't want to take credit for what ended up in print.

But yes, this is a topic I've given some thought to.

[Rik]

Because they call.

[pico23]

To escape this forum...well not really, but to get away from the distractions of my modern humdrum life that I have to live to be a responsible citizen.

Now if I had my way, I'd cash out, live off the government and spend my days tramping through the woods. But that would be frowned upon, so I sort of try to live a productive life. Ahh, the 2003 Bush unemployment extension was the greatest gift of the Bush administration. I climbed 100 days between November 2002 and June 2003. I paddled the whole summer and backpacked all fall till the vacation was over and I returned to work in Dec. That was the life!!!

However, when I can, for 2,3,4 days (I'm lucky, I can get a 4 day weekend 1 week a month, and a 3 day weekend pretty much whenever I want within reason) and 10-20 days during vacations, I say goodbye to this crap and just enjoy being away. And not once do I wonder what is going on in the "real world" not once do I think, boy I cannot wait to get back to work, to cyber space, to the monotony of day to day life.

It's precisely why I disdain cell phones, and PDAs, IPods, and even the cute colorful mapping GPS in the back country, because there use might seem innocuous to some, but what it does to me is brings the stuff I have grown to despise into my refuge.

As far as being unmarried, I'd assume if you married someone you didn't have compatibility with that there might be some issues with escaping. But from April-October my wife is happy to be with me (and I with her), she loves to paddle, car camp, and day hike (backpacking isn't a favorite but I don't like summer backpacking eitherm and neither does the dog...tooooo hot). Last year we paddled 40 days together (38 of them on overnight trips) considering we didn't start till July. F

rom Nov-March I have a no questions asked, no leash setup which was her compromise to me for not having to endure the cold. Of course, I'm not fully happy with this setup but it's the lesser of evils. (yeah, I'm an idiot, I mean how many guys complain when their wife says, I don't care if you share a tent with Ashley Judd or Angelina Jolie, just be back when you say so I don't have to call the DEC to track you down). She also understands my ethic of no cell phones in the wilderness when I'm on trips without her. A lot of times I go out with people that have to be in constant contact with there SO. It's annoying to say the least.

You definitely need to make sure whoever you marry is someone that either enjoys the same things, or doesn't interfere with you doing the things you love. I never understood how people could marry someone without the same core interest as themselves. Just because she's a hottie doesn't mean in 5 years you'll have a thing in common. And if you intend to remain married, having common ground, common interest, and spending time together is sort of a key thing.

Wait, was this thread about escaping to the wilderness?

[redhawk]

Wait, was this thread about escaping to the wilderness?

It was but I think Abagail Van Buren ("Dear Abby") snuck in!!

Hawk

[DuctTape]

I call it therapy. I go to "unplug". While I live a few hours from the Daks there are quite a few State Forests/Lands (and one National Forest) near me where I can go to relax and decompress.

[Bill I.]

Pico: That picture looks suspiciously like campsite #29 on the Lows Lake/Grass Pond channel.

Here are excerpts from my own writings that touch on these subjects:

Friday

Onto the Arterial, I turn north. It is April, the days are longer, and the mild weather has been with us for several weeks now. Over Deerfield Hill, where I can briefly see a stretch of blue mountains on the horizon, and then home. There is no time to lose. It is like I am losing the ability to breathe regular air, like I will be gasping soon if I can’t fill my lungs with the balsamic atmosphere of a wilderness forest. I will suffocate if I stay here too long.

The Bug

The canoe was a vehicle that introduced me to the pleasures of camping at secluded locations, beyond the reach of motor vehicles, and of being on the water in the morning when the fog is lifting and the loons are crooning. Until I experienced it myself, I had not suspected such joy was possible in modern life. I thought man had long since paved all this under. I could recognize that there was something of grave, elemental importance in this simple act of paddling, and that these woods and waters were somehow extensions of my identity. I had the bug, and I hoped to hell there was no cure.

But when fall came, and the nights got too cold for sleeping outdoors and the lake too choppy for paddling, I was at a loss. I didn’t know how one adjusted to the arrival of winter out here. The lake froze, the snow fell, and until this one day in February when I had decided to climb Canachagala Mountain I had faced the prospect of going all the way until April without any contact with my new lover, the Adirondacks.

So, lovelorn, I returned for this one winter day—but I just hadn’t figured out yet the true extent to which I was putting myself in danger by coming out here so unprepared for the conditions.

Room Around the Fire

I sit back down on the ground and watch the pale light cast shadows on the balsam fir boughs above me. A strange thought has been dogging me this evening. I feel a distinct sense that there is something missing—that there is room around this fire for someone else.

Which is highly unusual, because I am the type of person who feels more alone on a city sidewalk or in a crowded room than when I am in the woods with no other companion than my dog. Being alone, for me, is not a physical state—the spatial separation between myself and other people—but rather the sense of being lost within a gigantic indifference, far from sensual beauty and people capable of appreciating such beauty, no matter how populated that place might otherwise be. Here I am at ease.

So why should a sense of longing encroach on me here, in my own space? I’ll never know, but nevertheless there it is: this was a day that should have been shared.

When was it—last week? I was walking into Barnes & Noble and held the door for the guy behind me. I had to turn and look because he was talking away in full voice, but not to me. There was no one else around. A blathering idiot? As he turned I could see the piece of silver plastic dangling from his ear, a technological earring that allowed him to talk on his phone while appearing to uphold half a conversation with himself. No self-consciousness, no embarrassment. Like it was the most natural thing in the world to do.

If this is what I am missing when I’m out here in the woods, then let the world go mad. If I should return on Monday and discover that it is now the fashion to have the word “DUNCE” tattooed on one’s forehead, then that’s the world’s concern. So long as I have wild places like this and the health to enjoy them, then I have what I want from life.

Even so, that feeling is still there. Like something missing, something I forgot to pack. It doesn’t matter, I decide, because there is nothing that can be done about it here, now.

November Falls

As the temperature warms, the snow becomes softer and less reliable. It is good that we have no ambitions to stray any further from camp. Lexie naps in the sunlight, and I catch up on my reading. I think about friends that I have not seen in years, who moved away after school and never looked back. I wish them all the economic success in the world, but I don’t envy their rootlessness one bit. Even though I love to travel, I usually feel like an Adirondacker taken out of context whenever I do. However familiar and ordinary these sprucy woods may have become to me by now, this is right where I belong.

A Primitive and Unconfined Type of Recreation

My watch says it’s almost noon. I take off my daypack, set it on the snow, and relax to the extent that the cold allows me to sit still and daydream. I delight in the playful currents of the river as it spills over the horizontal rocks. I delight in the formations of colored ice, molded and fluted by the water and the fluctuating temperatures. I delight in the white noise of the cascade, which fills the hemlock forest with its hypnotizing static. I find a certain hemlock tree that is comfortable to sit against. Its green canopy shines like a stained-glass window above me in the sunlight. A wilderness forest has no banalities. All is beautiful.

There are other details that I seem to be seeing today with a fresh outlook, too. The way the moisture in the air on a mild winter day draws out the fragrance of the balsam twigs. The way the supple boles of the hemlock trees seem purplish against the gritty snow. The spruce trees dying in their quiet epidemic. The green ice in the swollen river. Sheer ice coating the lower tree trunks. Horse-hoof fungi glazed like ceramic paperweights. Coyote tracks. Meadows that had once been forests.

Four Minutes

Listen—is that a pack of coyotes I hear? Somewhere to the south, I can’t tell where. Deep in the woods—there, Lexie hears it too. I heard her collar when she lifted her head. Coyotes for sure, several of them, spread out across the hillside. It sounds like laughter heard from all the way across a quiet restaurant, the raucous and overbearing response to a joke I couldn’t hear. They don’t realize their voices are carrying, or that we are even here at all.

The difference is that if this was a restaurant, I might be put off by such obnoxious behavior. But here I have just the opposite response. There’s a definite exuberance in their yips and yowls, a love for life even on a seventeen-degree night. I can relate. I wish I knew what the joke was, so I could laugh too.

Like all laughter, theirs fades away in a moment, leaving me in silence again beside the dark pond and beneath the stars. Coyotes are the voice of the forest the way loons are the voice of the lakes. It’s hard to believe anyone would kill one. People used to shoot loons, too, believing they were killing too many fish or something.

The Departure

There was really only one reason we had to leave, and that was because tomorrow was Monday, and Monday waits for no man. Monday, with its schedules and demands, its mergers and acquisitions, its tasks and its boredom. It’s no secret that I feel more invigorated out here, passing an entire day of light rain inside a tent, camping beside a lake six miles from the nearest road, even rowing across the lake in the drizzle, than I ever have on any Monday filled with air-conditioned comfort. More of significance and meaning had happened today, even when nothing had really happened at all. I will remember today and write about it. Monday will come and go in a dizzying blur of homogeneity and never be thought of again.

But Monday is an obligation from which I am not exempt. If I played truant, someone would eventually notice and come looking for me. I would be dragged out of here one way or another, so why not go gracefully?

(c) Bill Ingersoll

[chairrock]

We go to the mountains to escape the coastal flooding caused by global warming, (and all that other stuff too).

[backwoodsman]

To come back home and appreciate and nice, warm ,soft,bed.

[Kevin]

Now if I had my way, I'd cash out, live off the government and spend my days tramping through the woods. But that would be frowned upon, so I sort of try to live a productive life. Ahh, the 2003 Bush unemployment extension was the greatest gift of the Bush administration. I climbed 100 days between November 2002 and June 2003. I paddled the whole summer and backpacked all fall till the vacation was over and I returned to work in Dec. That was the life!!!

I blushed (and laughed a little too) after reading that. I've shared that thought many times over the years, and had my 6 month unemployment stint in 2005 that I took full advantage of. Unfortunately I was unemployed October to January this past year but had bad weather and a few nagging health problems curtail some of my plans.

I go out there to get away from in here. What I do out there is private and personal, but it's not all that different from what's been already posted here. It's medicine to me.

[pico23]

Wildrivr...Good call, was probably site 29 (I don't remember the #) but the location is correct. I was suprised that Grass pond was that full on a september weekend. The better 2 or 3 sites were all filled. This one was a bit anticlimatic for the last night...still better than being at home!!

I hear you kevin. I was almost unemployed a few weeks ago. I managed to minimize my disgruntled nature over the next day. I figured while there are a few inequities, how many people can take off a 3 day weekend any weekend, or a 4 day weekend semi frequently. And it was a wakeup call to use my 3 weeks of vacation ASAP, in case I decide to change my mind

BTW, lucky guy. I got 9 straight months, but you got 2 6 month vacations...I'm jealous.

[Judgeh]

We go to the mountains to escape the coastal flooding caused by global warming, (and all that other stuff too).

A depleted ozone layer may mean we won't escape the rays of a stronger sun on that mountain top! (Sorry to acid rain on your terrain. )